Catalinbread Introduces the Naga Viper Treble Booster

August 22, 2011

Portland, OR (August 22, 2011) --
The Naga Viper is a booster in the grand old tradition of the Dallas Rangemaster Treble-Booster. The Rangemaster has been used by many influential British guitarists including Tony Iommi, Brian May, Marc Bolan, and KK Downing and Glen Tipton of Judas Priest. These guitarists, while completely unique in their styles, share the Rangemaster secret of boosting their cranked tube amps into a juicy, harmonic-laden rock tone that always cuts through the mix.

The Naga Viper is Catalinbread's version of this famous circuit and it adds two controls, Range and Heat, to the original's single Boost control. The Range knob is a continuous control allows you to go from classic treble-boost to a full-range boost and anywhere in-between. The Heat knob gives you control over the gain level, unlike the original which was fixed at maximum gain.

A treble booster is not like merely turning up the treble control on an EQ pedal. Besides enhancing treble response, it adds its own subtle harmonic distortion and gives you a lot of "push" to really saturate the front-end of your tube amp. The Naga Viper has a Range control that allows you to dial in exactly what frequencies get boosted.

The traditional way to use a treble-booster is to plug it straight into an already cranked and overdriven tube amp like the Marshalls, Laneys, and Voxes the British guitarists used. Since the amps were already cranked up, a full-range boost would result in a muddy sound with no definition. That is why it was desirable to boost treble!.

But in this modern era of electric guitar, many guitarists use overdrive pedals that emulate the sounds of cranked big amps into their smaller combos. The Naga Viper is carefully voiced to allow you to boost your "amp-in-the-box" pedals to to get those famous juicy, saturated sounds at reasonable volume levels. Catalinbread says the Naga Viper was made to go with their Dirty Little Secret MkII and CB30 overdrives.